It is becoming increasingly common for shoppers to search for the particular product in which they are interested using electronic search mechanisms, such as Internet-based search engines. The complex systems used by such electronic search mechanisms to process incoming product data from multiple merchants and deliver that product data in the form of search results to millions of customers must ensure that customers receive the best information available. In order to do this, product offering information, data that represents an offer to sell a particular product by a particular party, must be obtained from multiple sources and stored in a way that allows the product offerings to be easily searched.
One approach to storing such information is to place all data, such as electronic product offering data, in a database. A problem with the approach is that it does not take advantage of interrelationships among product offerings. For example, using this approach, two product offerings, each from a different merchant and each for a copy of Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby”, would be unassociated in the database. In such a case, the electronic search mechanism, during a search for books with the word “Gatsby”, would have to find each of the product offerings separately. A problem with this approach is that finding multiple product offerings for the same product separately uses extra time and processing power.
An improvement to the approach discussed above is to use product abstractions—abstract representations of products—to group product offerings. In the approach, product offerings are associated with product abstractions, which may aid a search mechanism by allowing the search mechanism to search product abstractions in addition to or instead of product offerings. In this approach, a search mechanism may find product abstractions that match queries and, from the mapping between each product abstraction and its corresponding product offerings, find the matching product offerings, thereby simplifying searching. For example, if two product offerings from two merchants, each for a copy of Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby” were each associated with a Gatsby product abstraction (a product abstraction representing copies of Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby”), then, using this approach, an electronic search mechanism in searching for copies of “The Great Gatsby” would find the Gatsby product abstraction and, given the mapping between each of the product offerings and the product abstraction, the two product abstractions. This saves on the time and operational cost of processing queries.
In order to implement an approach using product abstractions, techniques are needed for mapping product offerings to product abstractions. One approach to mapping product offerings to product abstractions is to do data field matching between data in the product offering and data in the product abstraction. This may be accomplished using a database query. For example, a mapping from a product offering of Fitzgerald's “The Great Gatsby” to a product abstraction may be performed by querying a database for a product abstraction that has “Fitzgerald” as the author and “The Great Gatsby” as the book title. A problem with this approach, however, is that data must match exactly between the product offering and the product abstraction. For example, consider a product offering for a book with “The Great Getsby” (note the “e” replacing the “a” in the word “Getsby”) as the title and “Fitzgerald” as the author and a product abstraction with “The Great Gatsby” as the title and “Fitzgerald” as the author. Since both the title and author must match, this product offering would not be mapped to this product abstraction, even though, in essence, they each refer to the same book by the same author. If, in using this approach, the restriction was relaxed and, for example, only one of the two terms needed to match from the product offering to a product abstraction with “The Great Gatsby” as title and “F. Scott Fitzgerald” as the author. In this case, product offerings for “The Great Gatsby” Cliff Notes by Karen Maurer and “Tender is the Night” by F. Scott Fitzgerald would both be erroneously mapped to the product abstraction for “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald product abstraction. Approaching the problem in this way causes a lack in specificity.
Therefore, based on the foregoing, it is clearly desirable to provide a method for associating product offerings with product abstractions that does not have the problems of requiring exact textual matching of data, but still preserves the specificity necessary to appropriately map product offerings to product abstractions.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.